Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010

On Nov. 30 the U.S. Senate passed the most sweeping food safety legislation since the Great Depression. It’ll be interesting to see whether House and Senate bills are reconciled and legislation actually makes it through.

We know from tracking online readership that current headlines will send folks trolling through the SCM archives, so here’s a suggestion for the trollers: Last year we kicked off the redesigned Santa Clara Magazine in summer 2009 with an issue on food — including an exploration of food safety in “Saving bounty,” which looks at some of the successes and failures in the food safety system.

One of the voices you’ll hear there is that of Drew Starbird ’84, an expert on food safety and now dean of the Leavey School of Business. (Starbird is also involved in tackling hunger in communities in the Bay Area; another feature in that summer ’09 issue offers ideas for solving hunger in our lifetime.)

The legislation that is (or isn’t) working its way through Congress does not address, however, the alphabet soup of agencies that remain responsible for ensuring food safety. For our piece on food safety, writer John Deever offered a primer on the agencies and their acronyms and who’s in charge of what.